Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit Performance and Good Practice Guide
Other resources
- HB/CTB Guidance Manual
- HB/CTB Overpayments
Guide (1.7MB)
- HB/CTB Subsidy Guidance Manual
- HB/CTB
Council Tax Benefit Take-up: A Best Practice Guide (532KB)
- Customer
Management System – A
guide for local authorities (230KB)
Print Version
The Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit (HB/CTB) Performance and Good Practice Guide replaced the old HB/CTB Performance Standards Guide on 1 April 2008.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) published this guide to coincide with the introduction of changes that impact on local authorities’ (LAs') HB/CTB services. In England, this includes the delivery of the proposals in the 2006 Local Government White Paper Strong and Prosperous Communities and the transfer of HB/CTB reporting responsibilities from the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate (BFI) to the relevant audit bodies in England, Scotland and Wales.
The purpose of the guide is to:
- provide some context and set out how DWP will work with individual LAs
- give detailed guidance on the performance indicators for HB/CTB and DWP’s expectations in relation to them
- provide information on the performance and management information data that will be available on the DWP website to support benchmarking and self-assessment
- outline assessment and inspection changes
- provide good practice guidance to help LAs manage their benefits services effectively and efficiently.
All important new additions and updates to the guide are shown on the Updates page.
How to use this guide
The guide is divided into three main parts:
- Part One – The Performance Framework – provides background information, guidance on the performance indicators (including technical guidance) and information on how DWP will work with LAs on performance-related matters. It also contains links to good practice to help LAs maximise performance against performance indicators or match up to the Audit Commission’s description of what a benefit service should deliver.
- Part Two – Good Practice – contains all the good practice. We have used a signposting system in this part to enable you to quickly find good practice that will help you to identify more efficient ways of working or key performance drivers.
- Part Three – Helpful tools and checklists – contains useful resources.
We have produced the guide as an electronic version only.
Contact us with your comments
We hope LAs will find this guide useful and are keen to receive your feedback. If you have any suggestions for new material or ideas on improving the guide, please email your comments, with the subject heading 'Performance and Good Practice Guide' to: performance-framework@dwp.gsi.gov.uk.